Will.i.am turned Obama’s groundbreaking “Yes We Can” speech into a star-studded viral anthem. But how to include the growing chorus of supporters who weren’t celebrities into it while bolstering Obama’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination? This challenge was one that my friends at Syrup and I were excited to answer, and the solution was to turn the black and white video directed by Jesse Dylan into a realtime photomosaic of community generated images. The site launched, won many awards, and Obama won a thing or two as well.
The trick was to stream the images, categorize them by the kind of pixel they could represent, and store them in memory. Instead of generating a new image for each pixel wasting cpu time, I just redirected a pointer to the image in memory, which allowed us high-framerate buttery smoothness on even the slowest of 2008 computers.